[i18n-activity] Recommended Characters Sets considered harmful

aphillips has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/i18n-activity:

== Recommended Characters Sets considered harmful ==
7.2 Recommended Character Sets
https://www.w3.org/TR/ttml-imsc1.0.1/#recommended-character-sets

> A Document Instance SHOULD be authored using characters selected from the sets specified in B. Recommended Character Sets.

This text and the text in _Appendix B_ is intended to describe content restrictions that authors should observe when writing captions and subtitles in a TTML document. There are a number of problems with this:

1. Numerous important languages and their scripts, most notably the Chinese/Japanese/Korean scripts, but also, for example, the scripts of South Asia/India, the scripts of Southeast Asia, and so forth are completely omitted. These comprise large audiences who might well use TTML and IMSC, but who are excluded from consideration.
2. The reference materials that do exist have gaps in coverage or are uneven in the recommended glyph set supported by the fonts. For example, only `pt` and `es` include the currency symbols other than $ and Euro. Why this is the case is not clear.
3. Rendering systems generally use font fallback to provide coverage with high-enough quality for multiple scripts rather than using a single font or font collection. If the goal is to describe limited capacity devices, such as a (non-smart) TV which will have a single or small number of hardcoded fonts for captioning built in, it would be more useful to describe a few "profiles" for minimum glyph sets than trying to break it out by language. Even then, I'd be concerned that we're artificially promoting to implementers specific language support rather than providing useful guidance to authors.

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Received on Thursday, 25 May 2017 16:58:48 UTC